[A]s the votes were being counted that would show Christine Hallquist the Democratic nominee for governor, Rep. Selene Colburn, P-Burlington, told the Hallquist supporters crowded around the bar of Burlington’s Skinny Pancake restaurant that this victory would be heard “across the country, across the world, as nothing short of historic.”
She was right. The next morning, Hallquist’s picture and the story about her victory were on the front page of the New York Times (at least the online version), on all the network and cable news programs, and noted in the Guardian in England, Le Figaro in France, Haaretz in Israel, and elsewhere.
It was indeed nothing short of historic. For the first time, a transgender person had won a major party nomination for high office.
Or as the headline in Le Figaro read, “une femme transgenre pourrait devenir gouverneur du Vermont.”
More calmly and in English, Annise Parker, the former mayor of Houston and the president of the LBGTQ Victory Fund, proclaimed that “Christine’s victory is a defining moment in the movement for trans equality.”
Historic it surely is and a defining moment it might be. But Hallquist’s political prospects might be better served the sooner all this talk about history and defining moments fades away. It may help her raise money, but otherwise the longer it’s on the front pages the harder it will be for her to defeat incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
Not because many Vermonters dislike or are uneasy about transgender people. No doubt some are, there apparently being no place on earth devoid of at least a few who are bothered by anyone whose ethnicity, religion, or sex-and-or-gender orientation is different.
But based on the evidence at hand, that’s a small minority in this state, and a tiny sliver of the people who would vote for a Democrat to begin with. The political challenge facing Hallquist is less that some people will be prejudiced against a transgender person than that many voters will begin to think that being transgender is all of what she is.
It isn’t. She’s an experienced and successful business executive who has been moderator of her town meeting. And she won a decisive victory Tuesday. She didn’t get a majority of the votes, but she got far more than her challengers.
But one reason she won the primary was that she was better known than her two adult challengers and she was better known because she had transitioned. On top of that, some Democratic primary voters in this very progressive state wanted to help bring about that defining moment. They wanted to help make history.
As some will want to do on Nov. 6. But about 110,000 people voted in both party primaries Tuesday. Four times that many are registered. The ones who want to make history will be outnumbered by those who want a governor who knows how to do the job.
Scott does. During the campaign, none of the Democrats demonstrated that they do. Hallquist’s first challenge is to show voters that she has a basic grasp of what governors do and the ability to do it.
She has the advantage of being a Democrat who supports those Democratic positions – higher minimum wage, mandatory family and medical leave, legalizing the sale and taxation of marijuana – that most Vermonters favor but Scott opposes. She could also benefit from big turnout if Vermonters flock to the polls to demonstrate their disapproval of President Donald Trump.
But she isn’t as good as Scott is behind a podium. And she may have a problem explaining two of the issues she said set her apart from the other candidates: “Connect every home and business in Vermont with fiber optic cable,” as her website noted, and easing climate change “through cost effective investment,” whatever that means.
As the former head of an electric utility company, she said, she could get the utilities to extend high-speed internet connections “because that’s what they do.”
Maybe that’s what they can do. What they do do is sell electricity for profit. If they cannot profit by extending service that “last mile” they won’t without a state subsidy or some other incentive.
On climate change, Hallquist said several times during the campaign that it could be dealt with without costing anything. That would come as a surprise to almost all advocates of greenhouses gas reduction. If Hallquist has a secret plan they don’t know about, she hasn’t revealed it.
Voters tend to be suspicious of candidates who claim they can provide benefits with no costs.
Right now it isn’t even clear that Hallquist has a united party – or more accurately a united left-of-center – behind her. Second-place finisher James Ehlers said he would not endorse Hallquist unless she pledged not to accept corporate contributions for the general election.
Ehlers, the executive director of Lake Champlain International, has never expressed any institutional loyalty to the Democratic Party. But he has a following. He got almost 13,000 votes, and though he has no power either to deliver or withhold most of them, Hallquist needs as many of them as she can get. A rapprochement with Ehlers would be helpful.
At the Ehlers campaign event Tuesday night there was some bitterness (there is usually some bitterness in the losing camp) over the candidacy of third-place finisher Brenda Siegel. In the view of some Ehlers supporters, Siegel and Ehlers were both to the left of Hallquist (a business executive who voted for Scott two years ago) and that had Siegel not split that more leftish faction, Ehlers might have won.
Not likely. Hallquist got more votes than the two of them together. But Ehlers supporters were also angry about an online announcement sent by one Siegel supporter – a self-styled “Berniecrat” named Kristi Zola – that falsely claimed that Ehlers had opposed the state treasurer’s clean water funding proposal.
It’s unlikely that this message got anywhere close to enough circulation to have mattered. But it’s another illustration of the reality that in corners of the political left (and the right and center), politics can be played hard and dirty.
And another illustration about how the messy present complicates matters for those trying to make history.
